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The service will be primarily based out of Ally's Charlotte, N.C., office, but will rely on several dozen loan processing workers in Madison Heights through a firm called LenderLive that has partnered with Ally.

Ally Home will offer mortgages online and over the phone, without any visits to a bank branch. It is a business model similar to that of Quicken Loans, the online mortgage giant whose headquarters is a short walk from Ally's downtown Detroit office.

In fact, Ally is a tenant of Bedrock Detroit, the real estate firm belonging to Quicken Loans' founder and chairman Dan Gilbert. Ally says it has about 1,500 employees in the downtown skyscraper formerly know as One Detroit Center, now Ally Detroit Center.

"We wish them well in all their business endeavors so they can grow, hire more people in downtown Detroit and need more office space," Jim Ketai, CEO of Bedrock, said in a statement. "In the mortgage industry, it is tough for all competitors who choose to go up against Quicken Loans, our sister company, but we will still wish them well.”

Ally, whose chief businesses are auto financing and online banking, hasn't been involved in home loans since early 2013, when its former mortgage unit Residential Capital (ResCap) went through bankruptcy. Under GMAC, ResCap had been a large servicer of loans as well as an originator of subprime mortgages tied to borrowers with shoddy credit during the lead-up to the housing market collapse.

In a phone interview, Ally Bank CEO and President Diane Morais said that Ally Home will operate differently from ResCap and won't offer subprime mortgages.

"What we're doing with the launch of Ally Home is very much geared to providing more financial products and services to our customer base," said Morais. "At this stage, we are keeping it to prime."

Ally Home will offer a variety of mortgage products, including fixed-rate and adjusted-rate loans. The bank anticipates selling many of its loans to government-backed mortgage enterprises, such as Fannie Mae, which have relatively strict requirements for borrowers. It also plans to keep some mortgages on Ally's own balance sheet to be held long-term.

Crippled by ResCap's mortgage losses, GMAC transformed into a bank holding company in December 2008 to become eligible for a government bailout via the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The following year, the company renamed itself Ally Financial.

The size of Ally's bailout ultimately reached $17.2 billion. However, following Ally's initial public offering in 2014, the U.S. Treasury ultimately recovered $19.6 billion of that aid, or a $2.4-billion profit.